You use the Sitemaps option to submit new Sitemaps, see the status of existing Sitemaps, delete and resubmit Sitemaps, and export Sitemap-related data to an Excel spreadsheet. If your Sitemaps have any errors, you will see an indication of such under the Status field of your Sitemap listing. Figure 7-3 highlights the key parts of the Sitemaps interface.

Figure 7-3. Google Webmaster Tools: Sitemaps interface

You use the “Crawler access” option to manage your robots.txt file. You can do many things while on the “Crawler access” page. Figure 7-4 shows the default “Crawler access” screen. At the top you are presented with three tabs. The “Test robots.txt” tab is the default tab and is used for testing the robots.txt file. Clicking on the “Generate robots.txt” tab presents you with another screen where you can interactively assemble your new robots.txt file, which you can upload to your server. The “Remove URL” tab brings you to a page where you can tell Google to remove specific URL(s).

You will spend most of your time in the default (robots.txt testing) tab. Just below the three tabs, you should see the current status of your existing (or missing) robots.txt file. Immediately below that you will find what you can think of as your robots.txt testing area. There are three major fields you can play with here. The first text area field downloads your existing website robots.txt file by default. You can change this to anything you want, as the field is fully editable.

The next text area field is where you can list your URLs. Your domain name in the URL must match your actual domain name for the domain session you are currently viewing within Webmaster Tools. Each URL should be listed on a separate line.

Google also allows you to test your URL and robots.txt combinations with several different spiders, including Googlebot-Mobile, Googlebot-Image, Mediapartners-Google, and AdsBot-Google.

Figure 7-4. Google Webmaster Tools: Specifying crawler access

Google Sitelinks is a feature for enhancing relevant site listings with additional hotspot links found on a particular site. Sitelinks typically appear as the top result on the Google SERPs. If you own a new site, don’t expect to get your Google site links right away. Figure 7-5 shows an example as taken from Webmaster Tools.

Figure 7-5. Google Webmaster Tools: Sitelinks

Every site should strive to get sitelinks, as they imply authority as well as web presence. Sitelinks also occupy additional search results screen real estate, the space that pushes your competitors farther down the results page—something to be desired.

Once you earn your sitelinks, you can remove any unwanted links that appear in the Google SERPs using the Sitelinks section of Webmaster Tools. According to Google, sitelinks are completely auto-generated. Visit http://bit.ly/4EORUm to read more about sitelinks.

Google makes it easy when you have to move your site to another domain. Google states that doing this will help the company update its index faster and “smooth the transition for your users.” Figure 7-6 shows a screenshot of the “Change of address” subsection.

Figure 7-6. Google Webmaster Tools: Specifying a change of address

As you can see in Figure 7-6, Google provides you with step-by-step instructions for moving your site.

With the Settings option you can customize your geographic target, preferred domain, and desired crawl rate. Figure 7-7 shows a portion of this subsection.

If you wish, you can target users in a specific country by enabling the “Geographic target” checkbox. The default setting is Off. If you are worried about link canonicalization, you can tell Google about your preferred domain. Note that this is only one level of potential content duplication.

You can also set your own custom crawl rate. Google provides no guarantees when it will crawl your site. You are better off letting Google determine your site’s crawl rate.

Figure 7-7. Google Webmaster Tools: Settings options

By selecting the “Top search queries” option, you can see keyword queries where your site appeared on Google search results. Figure 7-8 illustrates the key parts of this page.

Figure 7-8. Google Webmaster Tools: Information about top search queries

The “%” column indicates the percentage of impressions of a particular keyword compared to all of your keywords. You also can see the actual rank or position of each keyword in the last column to the right.

On the righthand side of the screen is a section regarding your site’s click-throughs. It shows all searchers’ queries that made it to your site in a similar breakdown.

The “Links to your site” option is useful for current state backlink analysis. You can see who is linking to your internal pages, and enter your internal URLs to see whether they have earned any backlinks. You can also view the anchor text of your backlinks. Figure 7-9 shows parts of these screens to illustrate the concepts.

Figure 7-9. Google Webmaster Tools: Analyzing links to your site

The Keywords page shows the most important keywords found on your site. You can see what keywords are working. You may also be surprised by some keywords. If you see irrelevant keywords, your site may have been hacked. If you do not see your targeted keywords, you may wish to check for any crawl errors in addition to checking whether your particular page was crawled.

The “Internal links” page is similar to the “Links to your site” page. Here, you can search for internal links linking to other internal links. This is important, as it pertains to the flow of your link juice.

The “Subscriber stats” page shows your existing feed(s) and their Google subscribers; see Figure 7-10. You also have the option to add your feed as your Sitemap; as we will discuss in Chapter 10, it is best not to use this option.

Figure 7-10. Google Webmaster Tools: Analyzing subscriber stats

The “Crawl errors” page shows you your site’s crawling problems. There are three main tabs on this page: Web (which is the default), Mobile CHTML, and Mobile WML/XHTML. Figure 7-11 shows a portion of this page.

Figure 7-11. The Web tab of the “Crawl errors” page

Crawl errors come in all sorts of flavors. This option is particularly useful when tracking any broken links that Google bots are finding. The tool will also report pages that are restricted by your robots.txt file. In addition, you will see pages that time out or are unreachable.

The “Crawl stats” page shows a breakdown of Googlebot activities. Figure 7-12 shows a portion of this page. The first graph shows the number of pages crawled per day over a period of time. The second graph shows the number of kilobytes downloaded per day, and the last graph shows the download speed during that period. Each graph is augmented with statistical data, including data highs, lows, and averages.

Figure 7-12. Google Webmaster Tools: Googlebot activity crawl stats

At the bottom of the “Crawl stats” page is a graph of your site’s PageRank distribution (see Figure 7-13).

Figure 7-13. Google Webmaster Tools: Crawl stats PageRank distribution

Another gem of the Google Webmaster Tools platform is in the “HTML suggestions” page (see Figure 7-14).

Figure 7-14. Google Webmaster Tools: HTML suggestions

On this page, Google will tell you what it thinks of your site’s pages in terms of your meta descriptions, title tags, and nonindexable content. In each subsection, you will find tips regarding duplicate, short, and long meta descriptions; missing, duplicate, long, short, and uninformative title tags; and similar information.

When you click on the Visitors menu item, you will see a summary page that looks similar to Figure 7-18.

Figure 7-18. Google Analytics: Visitor overview

As shown in Figure 7-18, you can view a visitor time graph, visitor (metrics) summary, browser versions matrix, visitor connection speed summary, and visitor segmentation links.

The Benchmarking page is particularly interesting. When you open it, you will see comparative graphical analyses of your site compared to other sites of similar size. Figure 7-19 shows one sample.

Figure 7-19. Google Analytics: Visitor benchmarking

As you can see from Figure 7-19, the metrics used when benchmarking include the number of visits, site bounce rate, number of page views, average time visitors spent on the site, number of pages viewed per visit, and percentage of new visitors. Benchmarking is available only if you agree to share your data with Google and make your data available to others as part of Google’s combined vertical market data for your market. It typically takes two weeks for benchmarking data to appear after it has been enabled.

On the Map Overlay page, you can see a world map mashed up with your visitor stats. Just below the map you will see a list of countries and the corresponding number of visitors originating from a particular source country.

The “New vs. returning” page shows a breakdown of new and old visitors. You can compare the two metrics by viewing the generated pie graph. We will discuss the topic of goals and conversions later. For now, know that if you have defined any goals, they will show up on this page, broken down by old and new visitors, under the “Goal conversion” tab.

The Languages page is similar in style to the preceding two pages. You get a table listing of languages sorted by popularity. As before, you can also see this sort of breakdown under the “Goal conversion” tab.

The “Visitor trending” menu option opens another set of submenu options, including those for absolute unique visitors, page views, average page views, time visitors spent on the site, and bounce rate. All of these submenu items produce pages with historical (per-day) listings.

The “Visitor loyalty” menu item opens with a secondary menu offering different options including visitor loyalty, visitor recency, length of visit, and depth of visit. The “Visitor loyalty” screen shows the number of repeat visits.

The “Visitor recency” page is concerned with previous visits and will tell you when the last visit occurred. The “Length of visit” page shows a breakdown of all visits based on length of time, and the “Depth of visit” page shows a similar breakdown per page view.

The “Browser capabilities” menu option opens a secondary menu that contains different options, including those for browsers, operating systems, screen colors, screen resolutions, Flash versions, and Java support.

The “Network properties” menu option opens a secondary menu that contains different options, including those for network location, hostnames, and connection speeds.

To define your conversion goals, click on the Analytics Settings link on the top-left corner of the Google Analytics screen, and then click on the Edit button for the desired profile (site). You should see a screen similar to the portion shown in Figure 7-22.

Figure 7-22. Google Analytics: Goal creation step 1

You can define four different goals for each profile. In this case, you should click on the Edit link as shown in Figure 7-23. You should then see the screen in Figure 7-24, shown later in this chapter.

Figure 7-23. Google Analytics: Goal creation step 2

Filling out the top portion of the form is mandatory. Let’s examine those details first. There are several key fields. The first field allows you to make the goal active or inactive. Since this is a new goal, select the On radio button.

The next field, Match Type, has three options: Exact Match, Head Match, and Regular Expression Match. Exact Match implies identical URLs of the target goal page and the one you specify in this form. Head Match implies a partial match (useful for dynamic URLs).

If the URL you specify in this form matches any part of a user’s URL, the goal condition will have been met. The situation is similar with a regular expression match. If the expression matches the user’s URL, you have your goal condition (conversion).

Regular Expression Match is the most powerful of the three match types. For more information, review the Google guide at http://bit.ly/1QUZyZ.

Moving down the form we get to the “Goal URL” field. In this field you enter the destination (conversion) URL based on the previous field (match type). For the simplest case, just add your goal (relative or absolute) link. Make sure your match type is set to Exact Match.

The next field is “Goal name.” You can enter any name that makes sense for your particular goal. For example, if your goal is for people to sign up for your email newsletter, you can enter “Email Newsletter.”

Moving farther down we get to the “Case sensitive” field. By default, the URL characters are case-insensitive. If you wish to change that, check this option to enable case sensitivity.

The last field, “Goal value,” allows you to add a particular (e.g., monetary) value to the goal. If you are not sure what to add, you can just leave it at zero. How you define your conversion value depends entirely on your site. If you are selling an e-book product, for instance, you could put the e-book’s price as your goal value.

What is a funnel? A funnel is an ordered set of pages leading to a goal page. Let’s suppose you are an online retailer and are selling different products. The following code fragment illustrates the typical order of operations on your site, starting from browsing for products:

/ProductCatalog.asp?prroductid=1234& (Product Catalog Page)
/AddToCart.asp                       (Add to Cart Page)
/Checkout.asp                        (Checkout Page)
/Shipping.asp                        (Shipping Page)
/Billing.asp                         (Billing Page)
/ThankYouConfirmation.asp            (Purchase Order Goal)

You could use this exact sequence when creating your funnel. Once you set it up, you can view reports to see whether all people went from the first step to the last or whether some people changed their minds in the middle of your funnel sequence.

If some people changed their minds, you can then research why this could be the case. For example, some people may not like your shipping rates, whereas others may not like your billing options. Figure 7-24 illustrates how this would look in a complete form.

Figure 7-24. Google Analytics: Goal and funnel setup

You can see all the things we discussed in the preceding subsections related to goals and funnels by using the submenu options under the Goal main menu item: namely, Total Conversion, Conversion Rate, Goal Abandoned Funnels, Goal Value, and Funnel Visualization. Note that the Goal Abandoned Funnels feature is being phased out.

Because it is based on JavaScript, Google Analytics is not 100% accurate. JavaScript resides in HTML pages. All of your other files, including image, video, and audio files, are not supported out of the box. You typically need to create some sort of workaround. For more information on tracking your file downloads with Google Analytics, visit http://www.google.com/support/googleanalytics/bin/answer.py?answer=55529.

Furthermore, Google Analytics will not record any data on devices that do not support, or that disable, JavaScript. Many mobile devices fall into this category. Including Google Analytics code in every HTML file creates a bit of overhead. To speed up screen rendering, many mobile devices will ignore the JavaScript by intent or by user selection.

No tool is perfect. Although Google Analytics provides lots of cool metrics, its accuracy is questionable at best. For example, how does Google calculate the average time a visitor spent on a site? Let’s suppose there are only two pages on a website. The user arrives on the first page, reads the page, and then moves off to the second page. How does Google know whether the user read the second page? What if the user moved away from the computer, came back 30 minutes later, and then returned to the first page? You can see how this metric could be skewed, and this is only one scenario.

Now let’s consider the bounce rate. Again, it sounds like a great metric, telling you the number of users who come to the first page of the website and then leave. But what if a user comes to a single-page site? The user goes to this site, reads the page copy, and leaves 10 minutes later. Does this indicate a user who did not find what he was looking for?

Although Google Analytics is great at many things it does, it is far from perfect. You can accomplish everything Google Analytics does and more with old-fashioned web server logs and a solid third-party analytics tool. Web server logs do not lie or report inaccurate data.

Google Analytics does have its benefits, as it is (almost) live and can be accessed from anywhere. With Google’s integration of Analytics with its other flagship platforms, the reasons for joining Google Analytics are plentiful.